In an attempt to improve the quality of Google’s Search results, the company is rolling out a new feature that will prominently display the authors of certain articles within search results.
Best Microsoft MCTS Training, Microsoft MCITP Training at certkingdom.com
“Authorship is a great way to identify and highlight high-quality content,” Google Product Manager Sagar Kamdar said in a company blog post. “Plus, the web is centered around people. People discovering content on the web often want to learn more about its author, see other content by that author, and even interact with the author.”
The new highlighting places a picture of an author to the right of an article he or she has written, along with a link to his or her Google Profile. In the example included above, my photo and name appear to the right of a recent review I wrote about the Jawbone Era.
The program will launch with a small subset of authors, but will roll out to more authors over time. It’s powered by Google’s new authorship markup, which adds new code to distinguish when a link is pointing to the author of an article.
Our bet is that Google hopes that author profiles in search results will encourage higher quality content, which isn’t always found in content farms.